The record
Three institutions, three eras, one discipline: build the structure, instrument the pipeline, grow partnerships that compound. What was built, and how.
The blueprint
Georgia Tech hired me in January 2022 as its founding Associate Vice President of Corporate Engagement, with a mandate most institutions discuss and few grant: close two legacy offices — the Office of Industry Research and the Office of Corporate Relations — and build one holistic organization in their place. The new Office of Corporate Engagement reported jointly into the Institute’s research and development leadership, and I served on the cabinets of both. That structure was the strategy: one front door, one view of every partner, one voice answering.
We built the operating system to match. A channels framework mapped nine distinct ways companies engage the Institute, with seven forms of revenue tracked against them in a customized Salesforce CRM. We applied AI to account management and prospecting, and we introduced front-end screening of prospective partners — protecting research compliance and the university’s name before a relationship begins, not after it goes wrong.
The results are Georgia Tech’s to report. Leaders from institutions across the country sought out the office to study the model, and Georgia Tech came to describe it as “a blueprint for the 21st-century university.” In 2026 I stepped down to help them build their own.
Quoted language as reported by Georgia Tech.
One voice
I joined Carnegie Mellon in 2016 to lead corporate relations, and the role grew as the results did — through institutional partnerships to, by 2020, a single associate vice presidency for business engagement and strategy, reporting to both the Vice President for Research and the Vice President for University Advancement. That dual seat mattered. It put research dollars and philanthropic dollars — usually managed in different buildings, on different logic — into one view of each corporate partner.
The operating principle was one voice. We regularly convened the university’s asset teams — research development, university advancement, government relations, technology transfer, career services — to plan account by account and present a single coordinated face to every major partner, through one recognizable front door for private-sector engagement. And we prospected proactively, approaching companies aligned with the research of faculty and centers rather than waiting for the phone to ring.
The portfolio widened across sponsored research, gifts, educational project agreements, executive education, licensing, and leasing to partners on campus — the multi-channel signature of enterprise relationships rather than one-off transactions. Facebook, Honeywell Robotics, and Philips opened facilities near campus during those years.
The long game
I spent fifteen years at Illinois, beginning at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, where the assignment ran in both directions: put some of the world’s most capable computing to work for the private sector — largely Fortune 500 companies — and move NCSA-born technologies out into the market. The commercialization side produced two startups during my term.
When NCSA competed for the National Science Foundation’s petascale supercomputer, I authored the economic-development and industry-engagement case in the proposal. In 2007 the National Science Board approved the Blue Waters award to build the leadership-class machine at Illinois — the kind of once-a-decade win that comes only when a university can credibly show what its infrastructure does for the economy around it.
The campus then asked me to carry the same work beyond NCSA, as associate director and later director of IT and economic development for the university — working to attract, grow, and retain companies in Illinois, and serving as a concierge for firms that wanted access to students, faculty, and facilities. Those fifteen years taught me the long game: infrastructure, patience, and relationships that outlast any single contract. I carried the lessons to Carnegie Mellon and Georgia Tech.